Jenni Evans named director of Institute for CyberScience

Jenni Evans, professor of meteorology at Penn State, has been appointed director of Penn State’s Institute for CyberScience (ICS). Evans had served as interim director of ICS since February 2016.

Image: Patrick Mansell, Penn State

by Julian Fung, January 24, 2017

“I am delighted by Professor Evans’s acceptance of the permanent directorship of ICS,” said Vice President for Research Neil Sharkey. “Jenni has done a marvelous job as interim director, laying the groundwork for the growth of both ICS’s technical capabilities and its community. Her outstanding intellect, diverse administrative experience, and passionate commitment to scholarship are exactly what ICS needs to keep Penn State at the forefront of computational and data-enabled research.”

In her time as interim director, Evans oversaw major expansion of ICS’s Advanced Cyber Infrastructure (ICS-ACI), Penn State’s high-performance research cloud. Researchers use ICS-ACI to perform modeling, simulation, and data processing that require massive computing power; the system now contains 20 PB of storage and more than 23,000 computer processors — up from 6,000 in 2015 — and continues to grow.